Marie ou l'esclavage aux États-Unis (review)

Reviewed by: Marie ou l'esclavage aux États-Unis Aurelian Craiutu Beaumont, Gustave de . Marie ou l'esclavage aux États-Unis, 2 vols, Marie-Claude Schapira, ed. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009. ISBN 978-2-296-09506-9 (vol. 1); 978-2-296-09507-6 (vol. 2) Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866) came to America in May 1831, accompanying Alexis de Tocqueville on their official mission as emissaries of the French government entrusted with the task of studying the penitentiary system in America. Disenchanted with the situation at home and dreaming of presenting their countrymen a model-mirror from which they could learn how to profit from democracy, the two young Frenchman went far beyond their official task and examined not only the prisons in America, but also the nature, mores, and institutions of the American democracy. As George W. Pierson described in his magisterial Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), they travelled extensively (from New York, lower Canada, and the Ohio River Valley to Memphis, New Orleans, Washington, and Philadelphia), took detailed notes, and wrote back home to their families and friends about their impressions of America (Beaumont's letters were published in Lettres d'Amérique 1831-1832, Paris: PUF, 1973). After their nine-month sojourn, they returned to France and eventually completed the report on the penitentiary system (it was published in 1834). A year later, Tocqueville published volume one of De la démocratie en Amérique and Beaumont published a novel, Marie ou l'esclavage aux États-Unis. Both were instant successes and went through several subsequent printings for a while. Of the two books, Tocqueville's was more successful and became better known (he published a sequel in 1840). Marie had seven editions until 1842 after which it fell into oblivion, in spite of Beaumont's prominent political and intellectual position (he was a member of the [End Page 354] Chamber of Deputies and author of another important book on Ireland). The oblivion into which Marie fell is regrettable. Fortunately, Beaumont's novel is now available in a critical two-volume edition presented by Marie-Claude Schapira (volume one includes the novel, while the second contains Beaumont's notes and appendices). Eminently readable and extremely prescient, it is the chronicle of a tragic love story between a young Frenchman (Ludovic), who leaves France in search of exotic adventures, and a beautiful young white woman from Baltimore, who had one distant ancestor of black origin, and was therefore condemned to suffer from deep-seated racial prejudices even in a nominally free country. If the love story and its sad denouement occupy a good part of the book, Marie is much more than a mere novel. It is, in fact, an extended literary and political essay on America, a roman-mosaïque des idées, chock full of interesting reflections on American society, mores, and institutions, that nicely complement Tocqueville's musings on these topics. As such, Marie must be read and interpreted as the necessary accompaniment of Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique, for in Beaumont's book the reader will find original reflections on the consequences of the equality of conditions, which is a key-concept for both authors (Schapira's edition also includes in the annex to the second volume three short fragments from Tocqueville's De la démocratie that point to the similarities with Beaumont's book). For Beaumont, perhaps more than for Tocqueville, America is a deeply paradoxical country insofar it uneasily combines liberty and equality with slavery and deep-seated racial prejudices. His thoughts on the troubled condition of the three races in America overlap with the ideas of Tocqueville from the last chapter of volume one of his masterpiece, although Beaumont went farther than him in predicting the civil war (vol. II, p. 64-79). Through the disenchanted voice of Ludovic, Beaumont comments on the tyranny of the majority in America, arguing that "in the United States, there are, for each act of tyranny, ten million tyrants" (vol. I, p. 86). For Ludovic, "public opinion is the most cruel of all tyrants" and "popular sovereignty is irresistible in its impulses" (vol. I...

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